FWIW, the jury is still out on Gen AI being good at text summaries. Because it shortens & emphasizes text based on distribution, not meaning, it’s less of a summary (ie, salient points highlighted) than a compression (ie, the most frequently asserted terms in the distribution). Not the same thing!

Lynda Barry (2016)

Welp, I got the age verification thing. Not sure if I'll end up sharing my data with this third-party provider. Feel free to follow me on the fediverse via the link on my profile.

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

procedural environments

rollercoaster tycoon, unfinished build, pc (1996) tcrf.net/File:RCT-Ear...

Embrace your shitty MS Paint skills and stop using AI for your placeholders.

I looooooove this trend of talking about computers and computing as a cute things. When I was a teenager computers where boys’ stuff and that sucked

Other work of the Ladybird artists ‘Village in Summer’ Travel poster by artist SR Badmin

the brain that can see a face in a wall outlet was always doomed to hear the voice of God in a markov chain

Newsletter: In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder. Here’s how to use RSS. www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-...

most industries have failed to communicate, especially in light of the USA eviscerating funding, is that science and engineering is not something you can just “discover” and “learn” once but, instead, they require steady application and continuous support over time or else you risk losing it.

the thing about "move fast and break things" is that not breaking things is often quite a lot faster

Moss from this morning. Had to rescue some clumps that had been kicked up and flipped upside down!

It’s a special kind of sadness seeing the entire genre of art made with computers that I have been pursuing since the 70s ruined by AI slop. I have never been less motivated to share new work in my life. 😿

Reports of things I’d really really like to see in person

Got up early today to look at the moss!

I’ve added an example of recovering from type errors during type checking to my language garden: github.com/brendanzab/l.... Unlike exception-based approaches to type checking, this allows checking to continue after an error has been reported, which is important for real-world implementations.

A new blog post on an interactive Datalog in Rust! Early days, but 1. nice and interactive, and 2. not less performant than my prior attempt (datafrog) when you use strings as the literal type (vs u32). More to come, as it's partially meant as a playground for me. github.com/frankmcsherr...

literal dream home

Just want to say I’m so incredibly grateful for all the academics writing cool papers, and giving interesting talks and contributing to our shared body of knowledge. Thanks so much, I’ve learned a huge amount from you!

I recently added an extension to my previous implementation of elaboration for higher rank types to my language garden: github.com/brendanzab/l... This adds support for unification, allowing you to leave off more type annotations and omit explicit type applications. I hope it helps somebody!

Actually the best life advice I ever got: Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. A half-cleaned room is better than an uncleaned room. Occasionally flossing is better than never flossing. A 10-minute workout is better than no workout. When it’s all you can do to get out of bed, get out of bed.

This is why it’s so important for scientists to learn to learn to communicate clearly to the public. Otherwise, your rigorous evidence-backed findings will be indistinguishable from bullshit

Some afternoon views from Wombat Hill Botanic Gardens, Dalesford last weekend.

In the past few days I’ve belatedly come to the realisation that domestic chores are much more fun if I imagine I’m in a studio Ghibli scene.

Happy #autismacceptancemonth ! Here's an old (like 10 years now lol) comic that explains the Autism Spectrum- still much needed, as I continue to see people- and most recently a book read out on bbc radio 4- think you're either 'mildly' or 'severely' autistic. Please give it a read 💖

Neat thing at this conference: a librarian crocheted a scarf based on how many emails they sent in a year -- posted with their permission.

Rivulet is a language that prioritizes flow. Its script was influenced by mazes, space-filling algorithms, Anni Albers' Meander series, calligraphy-friendly conlangs and natlangs This program calculates the first set of Fibonacci numbers, stopping at 21. It can be found at github.com/rottytoot...

This kind of work makes me think that we might just be able to have more nice things! I’m excited about the increase in confidence we can gain through symbolic approaches that support human reasoning in a precise and reliable way:

new blog post! Explaining a useful rust programming pattern that not many people seem to know about. paper.wf/binarycat/sa... #rust #programming

I was quite confident on my knowledge of marine biodiversity in my area (I have a PhD in marine biology after all). But today I learn about Paromola cuvieri, one of the largest crab species of the Northeast Atlantic, that uses its last pair of legs to carry live specimens of sponges and corals 🦑 🌊

Immediately stumbled on the M. C. Escher and the moss exhibits! This is so great!

“When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it… so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and …takes its place in the web of nature.” — Christopher Alexander (A Pattern Language, 1977)

I greatly enjoy the spatial intuition for staging used in this paper, “An ML-Style Module System for Cross-Stage Type Abstraction in Multi-stage Programming” by Takashi Suwa and Atsushi Igarashi: doi.org/10.1007/978-.... More diagrams can be found in these slides: gfngfn.github.io/media/slides...

I need game devs and gamers alike to understand that procedural generation is not genAI.

I’m so happy when creators and artists and programmers mention their influences and sources of inspiration. Being able to trace the flows of ideas is so exciting and useful when creating new things.

🧶💾 Punch cards aren’t just relics of computing—they’re still powering knitting machines today! Discover how hobbyists & archivists are preserving this blend of tech + textile. ⁠ 🔗 https://blog.archive.org/2025/02/12/vanishing-culture-punch-card-knitting/ ⁠ 🕳️ #VanishingCulture⁠

new tylr featuring inline obligations. press tab to jump to the next obligation, either a hole or a token-completion, or to accept the current completion. (no language models were harmed in the making of this video)

Just posted an evaluator for imperative control flow (loop, break, continue) to my language garden, implemented using continuation passing style: github.com/brendanzab/l...

I honestly believe our most powerful position in a toxic time that feeds on cynicism, apathy,& despair is to genuinely care and act for a better world. Cynicism is our enemy. We should check it, incl. on the left. It’s not intellectually superior. It’s the virus they’re trying to infect us with. NO

GenAI has polluted image search results, especially for animal pics. It’s now basically impossible to find accurate art references. Enter this: a repository of open-access, AI-free images of wild & exotic taxa. Artists creating *without AI* have blanket permission for derivative/transformative use.

This post by @zanzi on the Cybercat blog is the one I've been the most excited for in a very long time: Optics for UI 1: Deconstructing React with Parametrised Lenses https://cybercat.institute/2025/01/21/ui-para-optic/

A little comic about desire paths.

Being interested in the design of safe programming languages, I found the physical systems used on this steam railway fascinating: • A metal staff that only a single train can carry at a time prevents crashes • Mechanical constraints prevent signals being set incorrectly youtu.be/T2_LEQU6uZQ?...

i just wanna appreciate all of you who do smart things for free at least some of the time, for the public good. open source, or volunteer ops work, or like, consuming and synthesizing information to help others understand it

I say this with love: a completely reasonable null hypothesis in Rust (and really most complex projects) is "it wasn't glaringly obviously wrong, and we ran out of time, so it stuck". See also the neutral theory of evolution and genetic drift and fixation. Lots of things have no reason beyond noise.